California scientists have found a new mechanism of infection COVID-19
Scientists examined infected cells under a microscope and saw sprouting tentacle-like spikes on them. Stuffed, like the cell itself with viral particles, these spikes reach the neighboring healthy cells to infect them.
“It’s so ominous that the virus, before killing cells, first uses them to infect healthy ones,” says Krogan.
According to scientists, the resulting “zombie cells” with the help of tentacles, apparently, penetrate the bodies of cells and inject viral poison directly into their genetic command centers.
– Until now, researchers believed that COVID-19 uses one mechanism of infection of the human body, says Alexei Zarubin, a geneticist at the Tomsk Institute of Medical Genetics. – Like most other viruses, the classical way of their penetration into the human body lies through the cellular receptor. Then inside the cell it multiplies, and when there are a lot of viral particles, it destroys the cell, breaks out and sets off in search of the next victim. In the case of COVID-19, according to the University of California, the virus, in addition to the main method, uses an additional one: by penetrating the cell in the traditional way, it causes it to grow with tentacles, which are also called filopodia, and with their help penetrate other cells. With this distribution method, it is no longer necessary to have a virus-specific receptor on the infected cell, you just need contact, the physical proximity of a healthy cell to the infected one. And so the virus can infect cells that are usually resistant to the virus. The “insidiousness” of SARS-CoV-2 here is that healthy cells have the same membrane with infected cells, communication is easier and faster.
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The virus seemed to have developed an additional way to bypass a strong immune system that can fight most viruses. Perhaps this explains the fact that completely healthy young people sometimes get coronavirus.
– Were similar filopodia seen in other viruses?
– There were articles about the appearance of filopodia in SARS-1 in 2014, and they were also found in some other viruses (herpes, smallpox, HIV), but in the case of the new coronavirus, scientists note a much larger size and branched, tree structure of these tentacles. According to their assumption, this makes the virus more active and contagious compared to the previous ones.
Photo: freepik.com
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– The article says that knowledge about the new property of the virus will help in the future to find drugs against it.
– If we find proteins that trigger the growth of filopodia, then with the help of drugs we can block this growth and thereby significantly slow down the spread of the virus in the body. Thus, we will give the immune system time to cope with the “foreign agent” on our own.
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